Inside Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump held a rally this weekend at Madison Square Garden in New York City, which The New York Times described as “.”
Trump brought out his favored cast of conspiracy theorists and racist fearmongers, from Tucker Carlson to Stephen Miller. Among them were some new faces too, including a little-known comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe who referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” and made a racist joke about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween.
Investigative journalist Arun Gupta attended the rally. In an interview with ý Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on ý Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, Gupta explains the unique dichotomy of these kind of Trump rallies, which offer attendees both bigotry and hatred, as well as a sense of love and belonging for his disaffected voters.
Sonali Kolhatkar
joined ý in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of ý Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 of the same name.
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